Hi everyone. Any opinions on Wirestock?

https://www.wirestock.io/#howitworks

They seem to be the follow up of the group that wanted to start a blockchain linked agency.

https://www.microstockgroup.com/selling-direct/peer-to-peer-direct-stock-selling-platform/

Now they have opened a place that on the surface looks similar to blackboxglobal, they take 15% distribute to seven micros but also do your keywording and description (unless it is editorial).

For many part timers or newbies or people who are not good with English, this is certainly a very attractive idea.

makes more sense than a blockchain site IMO.

All content goes into a central port, juts like blackbox, not into your individual portfolios.

What I really don't like that nowhere on the site kann you find address, telephone number, bios of the team and managers.

But jjneff has looked at them, also brasilnut.

https://brutallyhonestmicrostock.com/2020/01/08/review-wirestock-stock-agency/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cClb-o5lQss&fbclid=IwAR3gzhzM4UBqgclksMj9Nm-_BjAYgYQ7bIotZTSwR6ICkHNjUS0I9yRqJ-c

I find it interesting enough to sign up.

But more info about the faces behind the service would make a huge difference.


Like Blackbox it will  be an additional place and not replace my main ports.

I just joined, there are still some bugs in the system. The most upsetting is if I choose to NOT use the automatic keywording, which is necessary if I want to submit anything Editorial, their system doesn't read keywords. My keywords are properly attached using XMP protocol. So why do I want them to do the keywording, when they don't? And if I have to fill in the specifics, except Description, which is limited to 150 characters so my descriptions are truncated...

They store releases and that seems to work fine. I released a shot of myself.  Accepted and distributed just fine.

I checked only some agencies, but they appear to submit to all anyway. Which ignores my three selections for example. However it appears they cross check before uploading anything, to see if it's already on the agencies. Nice touch for that second part.

What I'm getting at, is there are some bugs or inconsistencies and some parts don't seem to work as we'd expect.

This is interesting, agency minimums, for anyone. I revised the list, re-ordered:



If they are submitting images and their collection is on SS for example, they should be past the $500 mark in a flash, and I suspect level 2 just as soon. So the 25c is understated. SS is likely to be just the same as the rest in that range.

Look at IS.  Yeah, WS is honest, you might get a 2� dl

Here's how it works, the easy version. We upload, they are supposed to review and do the data, keywords Etc. upload to the agencies. They take 15% off the top, we get the rest. Minimum payout is $30. Pretty simple?

Oops, needed to add this, they are sold under the Wirestock name, not our name.

Example:  https://www.shutterstock.com/g/wirestock+inc?sort=newest 34,000 images on SS.

Well, here are some faces.

https://medium.com/hive-ventures/announcing-our-latest-investment-in-armenia-wirestock-eac8f365e3ff

Have you seen, where I can download a valid contributor contract?

I must give one to my accountant, everytime I join a new agency. And it must have their legal adress, tax details etc...

Text:

Announcing our latest investment in Armenia: Wirestock
HIVE Team

We first met the Wirestock team through Sebouh Der Kiureghian, a former product manager at Amazon and someone Nina Achadjian, the partner at HIVE Ventures, grew up with in the Bay Area. Sebouh had been spending time in Armenia and started to tell us about a company he had been advising there. He showed us the deck, shared his experience working with the team and why he was so bullish on the idea.

We were, of course, intrigued. Although we get hundreds of inbound messages from startup founders each year, a warm intro from someone we respect is always a priority, so we set up a call with the Wirestock team the very next day.

Within minutes of listening to Mikayel Khachatryan and Vladimir Khoetsyan�s pitch, we knew we had to invest. Not only had the two of them come from the right technical backgrounds and domain expertise, they were also able to clearly articulate the problem, market size, and their path to building a billion-dollar business. More than anything, Mikayel and Vlad were passionate about Wirestock�s mission: enabling content creators to earn money for their work, seamlessly and at scale.

Wirestock is tailor-made to serve creatives in the stock content industry. If you�ve ever seen a billboard, read through a company�s brochure, or even browsed the picture frames section of Target, then you�ve certainly interacted with stock content. Stock images and designs have allowed businesses all over the world to create stunning marketing, promotional, and commercial materials for years. As the world continues to become increasingly digital, stock content has become even more pervasive, spreading to websites, blogs, TV commercials, and on and on. With the increasing number of mediums that businesses use to interact with their customers, the market for stock content only continues to grow � in 2018 alone, over $3 Billion was spent on stock photography globally, a number that�s expected to grow to over $5 Billion by 2024.

This growing market is fueled by the hard work of content creators, a group of over 1 million worldwide creatives responsible for most of the beautiful visuals that we see on a daily basis. Traditionally, these creators have been stuck with out-dated, inefficient, and time-consuming processes to distribute and sell their work. A typical selling experience includes spending hours uploading photos, tagging and writing descriptions for each photo entry individually, posting certain photos for sale on stock agency websites, and then managing these postings on an ongoing basis. This process has to be repeated for each stock agency website a creator would like to sell on (there are over 10 major stock agency websites).

Enter Wirestock.

At its core, Wirestock is a one-stop-shop for stock content creators (photographers and illustrators) to distribute their work online, seamlessly and at scale. Within seconds, content creators can upload their portfolio of content for distribution on the world�s largest stock content websites. Content is automatically tagged and described using Wirestock�s proprietary software. All submissions are managed through one single Wirestock account so that creatives can spend less time uploading, managing and selling content, and more time doing what they do best: creating.


Wirestock�s automated image submission
All of us at HIVE believe in Wirestock�s transformative power for content creators around the world. This belief in the company and the founding team gave us the conviction to invest in Wirestock. Today, we�re excited to announce that HIVE is leading Wirestock�s first fundraising round. Our investment in Wirestock goes beyond capital � HIVE introduced the Wirestock team to top angel investors and mentors around the world, including Magdalena Yesil, Vahe Kuzoyan, Hovig Safoian, Argam DerHartunian, Vache Shirkian, Andrej Kiska, Ilya Golubovich, and Nerses Ohanyan, all of which chose to participate in this round of funding.


Congratulations to Mikayel, Vlad, Ashot, Hovhannes and the rest of the Wirestock team on their success to date and on completing their first fundraise. We are incredibly excited to welcome Wirestock to the HIVE family and look forward to partnering with the team for years to come.

Wirestock has already helped thousands of photographers make a living doing what they love and we can�t wait to see the team deliver that same quality experience to the rest of the world�s 1 million content creators.

Hello Wirestock?

Still interested in working with the wider stock community?

If you want to attract the interesting content, you will find that this goes much easier if you talk to us, the way Pat Gowan from Blackbox does.

Without the direct involvement of him and the team they would not have gone from 4000 to 50 000 contributors in 18 months.

Thank you for sharing.

Anyone uploading there, please share your experiences.

If they really want our business, then Wirestock will announce a community leadership person that talks to us.

Sounds like a really bad start for their business.

Portfolios with useless keywords will never achieve a good ranking and the quality contributors will stay away.

There is potentially a lot of demand for a service like that.

Why not do it right, pay attention to details and have reliable growth?

Fully agree with Brasilnut about their attitude and potential. They were open to take suggestions and reacted very fast. I see myself working with them exclusively. Time-saver is undervalued. They practically take almost the whole process away from me giving me time for new things. Thank you Wirestock.

If they are genuine, they will get a lot of support.

But we have been through a lot of startups that abruptly disappear.

There is a great need for this service and they can probably attract millions of contributors, especially in the non English speaking world if they are serious about it.

By the way, there is also this site: www.dropstock.io

Are they related?

Offtopic, is there any similar example of this in the past from any agency/distributor?

Quote

And once they are established, they can negotiate better royalty rates and thus partially offset the 15% you pay them.

On large marketplaces like Getty, shuttestock etc partners that upload large volume or special content can negotiate their own royalties and also ranking. Obviously a partner supplying high quality medical shots of open heart surgery will have more options, than a partner whose contributors send in sunsets and flowers.

And these contracts are not public, but many suppliers are quite open to discuss that.

You can also see it yourself, go to gettyimages and do a search. Then look at which collections are always on the first 3 or 4 pages. Some of these collections are getty content, some are from external sources like the flickr collection, the eyeem collection, canva, westend61 etc...Getty has over 200 partners.

These rankings are partly the result of quality content and sales results, but also part of explicit ranking.

You notice this if suddenly all your content drops drastically in sales. If you then check on getty you might find they have a new �hip and trendy� collection whose files are heavily promoted on the first pages.

Supplier agencies can also negotiate other royalty rates, they don�t have to accept 20% like the regular contributor.

Part of my sales success of sometimes very mundane files on eyeem, is because they are very prominently placed on getty. But this might not last forever.

With video I see that my videos coming to Shutterstock via Blackbox are always ranked higher than the files in my own video port.

File ranking is a complex process, but a lot of it does not depend on me. If my files come into a matketplace via a partner with a really good contract, they will have a much better chance than if I do it myself.

But...you pay for the privilege by sharing the royalties and usually the content has to be exclusive.

And you never know when a new �hip� partner comes along and gets better placement.

If wirestock gets itself a reputation of supplying a bad selection of files with crappy keywords...well they write their own ticket...

But they are still new, so they can learn.

In principle coming in with a joint portfolio everyone shares the advantage of getting a better ranking with a much higher upload volume. The latter seems to be a criteria on most agencies and is easy to observe.

They also march through the royalty rate system much faster together. So even if they do not negotiate a special royalty, the entire portfolio will reach the highest royalty level much, much faster than if you go it alone.

So that in itself, should quickly compensate for the 15% they take.

If they improve the keywording and make that, really, really good, then I believe 15% is cheap.

However, personally I would never give up my own portfolios. I would just treat it as an additional agency for exclusive content.

But I can see many people, who just do a little stock on the side or just want to upload holiday snaps use this service exclusively, if it works out.

Keywording is bad, they don't even pay attention to the notes I put to the reviewer about the location

Hi Microstock Community
 
First of all, thanks a lot for all your feedback and suggestions. We really love this community and actually started talking to you way before we launched Wirestock. It has still not been a full year since we launched Wirestock in February of 2019. As you may know, we are in an active phase of growth and are constantly improving the experience of content submission. To address the comments above, I want to list some of the improvements that we are working on right now:
 
-Keyword optimization for easy submission
-Curation and Easy Submission speed
-Ability to read metadata for non-easy-submission uploads
-Addition of new marketplaces
-Referral Program
 
We are planning to release a major update of Wirestock in the next couple of months which will be much faster and easier to use. Please stay tuned for new updates and improvements.
 
You can also check out this podcast episode to find out more about our team and our vision.

I have sent a first batch of photos at Wirestock.
At the ones already sent to the agencies, I see some mistakes, although I had at the photo title the format: city/monument title.
At the details tab, I do not see any option to submit any note, I only see a notes tab prior to submission.
Does anyone know how do I tell them the correct name?
Finally, out of the ones submitted, will I see after some days which photos were accepted at which agency?

As mentioned from Uncle Pete:
#The most upsetting is if I choose to NOT use the automatic keywording, which is necessary if I want to submit anything Editorial, their system doesn't read keywords.#

I was surprised reading it, because I uploaded after that and keywords were read from their system.

But since nearly one week now, the system even does not read any keywords - including commercial images.

Another thing:
They past keywords from one image to another, but the images are totally different.

My guess: They have big actual problems with a new system, which was planned to go online on 2nd September 2020. Since that time, everything seems to go wrong with uploading and submitting in case of keywording and reading keywords. Suggestions from me to order keywords were not done also. I found that image with wrong keywords on Alamy online.
And my files which are in the processing folder waiting already a week, too.

I do not want to blame wirestock. They really trying their best. Last weeks I had many problems to solve and they were always replying unexpectalbe fast and in a way that contributors like - respectful!

Does anyone here has the same problems now?

Did wirestock anywhere publish that actual are problems with a new system?

I only know about 2nd September as changing the system, because one of the friendly supporter told me that in an email wihtout I was asking about it.

I now wait until the new system works well with my new uploads.

What are your experiences since 2nd September?
Or am i alone with this problem?

Let�s hope, they will get fix it and the new system will be better as promised.